The GrangerSnape Primer
by Warrego
Summary: The Reader's Digest Condensed version of every fanfic you've ever read ...


Once having read upwards of about fifty fics, one starts to get a feel for the best traditions of the genre, if daunted by the vertiginous altitude to which the bar has been raised. Reducio oeuvre!  
  
Anti-litigation charm: all characters are JKR's, not mine, and she cannot be held responsible for what they do in their own time.  
  
The rest is yours, folks. A working knowledge of Anna's wonderful Roman Holiday is particularly desirable: if you've not had the pleasure, consider yourself under Imperio, and go off and read it. NOW.  
  
There is also a quote from Clive James' take on Roger's and Hammerstein's finest, which you will find in Clive James On Television: Criticism from the Observer 1972-1982, and which I cannot recommend highly enough .  
  
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It is Hermione's fifth, sixth, or seventh year, depending on the age of consent in the author's domestic legislature.  
  
Hermione sprints up a grassy mountain slope, alps in the background, then realizes that she is dangerously close to being late for a Potions class. Snape has them brew a potion employing raindrops on roses, whiskers on kittens (the bastard!), and bright copper kettles; Draco, the only real Slytherin in sight, steals and reserves warm woollen mittens for future use in a plot lemon involving his least-favourite Griffindor. Neville has a shocker; a trio of amused nuns shake heads and sing a sweet little song about Longbottoms's ineptitude with size 2 pewter cauldrons; Professor Lupin finally gets to hold a moonbeam in his hand.  
  
Hermione, tragically under used thus far thanks to her penchant for swallowing the library, acing all exams, saving Ron and Harry from themselves, single-handedly detecting werewolves and basilisks, mounting civil rights actions for house elves and romancing rival Seekers, gets an idea for an additional credit project/plot locomotive. Alas, there are no titled widowers who are simultaneously fathers of seven and living in Hogsmead and she is forced to make do with Professor Snape. Their first confrontation allows us to appreciate Miss Granger's brilliance, sweet stubbornness and Griffindor bravado, and Professor Snape's eloquent paranoia and general arsesholier-than-thou demeanour. Gods, he is almost as big a bastard as the Shire Reeve of Nottingham, and just as sexy, dammit. He comments on her teeth. Vagina dentata . Stop it, Snape. Although H's muggle parents are both dentists, she wisely decides it is Not Safe to ask them about this one.  
  
The project commences. Hermione gets her first sight of Snape's living quarters, and checks out bookshelves replete with all the writers on the author's undergraduate reading list. She notices that Snape reads multiple Romance languages, including Spanish, and that Ikea's global reach does not extend to the dungeons of Hogwarts.   
  
The project proceeds. Kindred Souls In Torment Meet. For a dozen chapters, or until the author caves in to an avalanche of emails from lurking fifteen year olds wanting their dose of SEX101.  
  
We learn that Hermione's duties as Head Girl include teaching seven hand- picked first-year Hufflepuffs the arithmancy of the Ionian mode. This minor project comes to fruition when Christmas comes to Hogwarts after Snape fails, for the twentieth year running, to have it canceled altogether. Dumbledore overcaters to the spirit of the season as usual, arranges jolly alpine puppet show, and makes the whole school dance the Laedler at something called the Yule Ball. Snape refuses to wear Lederhosen. He spends the evening nuking hapless rosebushes and scowling at Alpha Canis Major from a coign of vantage on the battlements of Serpens Tower.   
  
Hermione, forced to remain behind at Hogwarts for the Christmas break, works on her project, and Gets to Know Snape Better. Which latter is becoming the primary project. Sev, bathed in the redeeming glow of youth, intelligence, courage, unconscious beauty, the projected lust of 1623 WIKTT readers and the psychoactive volatiles of the project potion, feels himself becoming a one-man refutation of all conventional psychiatric wisdom on the durability of personality disorders. He confesses his distaste for the misspent youth that pursues him down the arches of the years, as well as his bewilderment at the number of hyperventilating Muggle women who seem to think that they've met him before.  
  
Voldie activates the Dark Mark. Sev has Very Bad Evening, getting himself comprehensively bashed up and returning to Hogwarts in circumstances carefully contrived to ensure that Hermione is the only one able to find and minister to him. Cruciatus, as described, sounds just like transitional phase labour. She patches him up as best she can, eyeing off the goods and realizing she is Falling In Love. Tricky plot bunny involving H's guardianship later, they are on a shopping trip to London and H, glimpsing the Snape vault at Gringotts, realizes that SS's folks are not the sort who need to buy their own silver. She bravely fights off her middle-class reservations about this. Lingerie is bought and sequestered. I love the smell of lemon balm in the morning.  
  
No bloody Quidditch. Thank God.  
  
Time warp opens into a parallel universe, where they save transfigured giant squid from a malevolent lobster. Love scene ensures, in which we learn that Sev is good on all three channels but lousy at post-coital chat, reverting to Stern Teacher Mode and telling Hermione that This Cannot Be.   
  
The Gods Of the Copybook Headings by now piling it on, Hermione is forced, once back at Hogwarts, to confront reality of Sev's DE past after she discovers a historical document, I mean pensieve, which preserves scenes of her best-beloved crashing a Muggle office Christmas party and performing acts of sneering terrorism.   
  
Shattered, Hermione confides tearily in Minerva McGongall, protesting that she "can't face him again". Minerva tells Hermione sternly but kindly that   
  
These Walls Are Not Meant to Shut Out Our Rroblems (But We Ward Every Inch Of Them, Anway), then transfigures herself into Peggy Wood and sings "Climb Every Mountain" in a rich contralto. Hermione wonders whether she could have Imagined It All and whether Severus Really Wants Her (so put your hand down, you silly girl).   
  
Sev, grappling with angst-ridden lust, tells Sibyl Trelawney, cunningly disguised as Eleanor Parker as Baroness Von Schweiter and with "nothing to offer him except wealth, wit, breeding and stunning beauty"*, that it is Over. Dumbledore does agony aunt detail. Again. Twinkles vaguely at Sev. Again. Would that Sev's troubles could melt like those damn lemon drops of Albus'.  
  
Voldie resurgent. Shit hits fan. Fudge fucks up, but the local nuns, witches all (so there), have pulled the spark plugs and the good guys triumph, in large part thanks to Hermione's arithmancy/transfiguration/animagus/potions skills (not divination, though).   
  
Sev realises he is deeply but unworthily in love, and goes off to summerhouse and sings "Something Good". He is joined by H, who confesses her undying adoration and falls into his arms again. Poetry is quoted, more or less accurately, in both English and Spanish (his accent is terrible).  
  
Hermione's project wins her a place at university, the order of Merlin (1st or 2nd class; Sev has to be content with a Third), the interest of a Muggle pharmacuetical multinational, and first prize at the Salzburg Festival. Warrego drowns in deluge of angry emails from aforementioned fifteen-year- olds, all furiously insisting that she "broke the SHIP. You broke the bloody SHIP!" 


End file.
